On Profiling, And Google’s Big Double-Cross

Google announced a new plan this week to help news publishers make money: Readers will be presented with a short marketing survey they have to complete before reading an article. Google consumer surveys is a clever enough way for a publisher to get more revenue without putting up more ads — or a dreaded paywall — and Google says replies will be anonymous.

Singel-Minded

In fact, you should never again believe any privacy promise Google makes, since it’s now decided that its old promises don’t count and its future depends on it building the most comprehensive profile of you that it can.

Google has said for years that it wouldn’t profile its users and built data silos to make it so. So for instance, Gmail debuted with ads that were keyed off words in a single e-mail. Mention pizza in an e-mail, you’d get an ad for pizza. It was a dumb system, with no memory of what you’d written. Over time, Google slowly expanded this so the ads you see on your newest e-mail might relate to an e-mail that was very recent — not quite dumb, but not quite a profile.

The same went for search. Ads were keyed off your search term, for only that search. It’s the most profitable advertising system in the world, and it had no profiling.

Recently, that was changed a bit so that if you recently searched for “New York airfare” and then a few searches later for “hotel,” you might get an ad for New York Hotels. Not quite dumb, but not quite a profile. Even Google’s AdSense program that shows ads on millions of non-Google sites either as keyword ads keyed off a page’s content or display ads was firewalled.

There was a profile here, but it was based on inferences made based solely on the pages that you visited that were running AdSense (now known as DoubleClick). Nothing from your Gmail account or search history played any role.

Then in 2009, Google punched a small hole in this wall so that what you do in YouTube could become part of that profile. Definitely a profile, but far removed from the sensitiveness that is your search history and e-mail.

In some ways, Google’s fear of being left behind — that the web is now as identity-centric as Mark Zuckerberg wants it to be — is very understandable. In other ways, it’s baffling.

While Google’s keen to point out that those walls were never written into the privacy policy, the walls existed. In February, 2009, I spent a couple of hours in a Google conference room, alongside Farhad Manjoo, while Google’s top engineer for privacy, Alma Whitten, dove into the technical details of how these walls worked.

And I was a believer. When Consumer Watchdog put out a stinging and inaccurate video depicting then Google CEO Eric Schmidt as a cretin, I defended Google’s privacy practices in a piece entitled In Defense of Google, Or Why Consumer Watchdog is Full of It, drawing heavily on Google’s internal walls.

Have you ever actually seen ads on third-party websites or Google’s own sites that are derived from assumptions Google has made about you based on your search history or what you have written about in e-mails? No, you haven’t. Google doesn’t do that. Every search ad and every ad in Gmail or Google Images is essentially blind to who you are and is keyed off only the search term you just entered or the e-mail you just opened. That’s because Google’s ad tracking system and your Google account system are separated by design. […] In terms of building profiles of users, Google is remarkably and admirably restrained in how it uses the insane amount of data it collects.

At the same time, I also predicted that when YouTube and Adsense were intermingled the day of the mega-profile would be coming soon: “It won’t take long for Google executives to look at the stock price and then at the data its not using and argue that the company could make even more money by selling finer and finer slices of its user base to advertisers. Soon, everything of Google’s that you touch will all become part of your profile — from its website analytics program, sneaky Big Brother-esque Web History program, checkout system, news subscription reader, image search, cellphone location reporting service, book digitization, news site and GMail e-mail and chats.”

And so it has come to pass.

Google, threatened by Facebook’s success in finally giving users an identity, has decided that it will combine all the data it can into a mega-profile. That means your searches, all the web history it knows about you, everything in your e-mail account, and all the data from Android phones and Google+ will be combined to build the mother of all online profiles.

Only a few things remain off-limits — Google Analytics, for one. Don’t expect that to last long.

But don’t worry: Google says your new profile is for your own good.

The idea, Google says, is that it should be able (for example) to figure out from your Android phone’s location and your calendar that you have a meeting in an hour-and-a-half, but that there’s a traffic jam which means you should leave now. That sounds swell, but the fall of the privacy walls isn’t really about such nice notifications. It’s about Google’s fear of Facebook and jealousy of Facebook’s ability to convince the web that we all need to be signed in under all real names all the time.

In some ways, Google’s fear of being left behind — that the web is now as identity-centric as Mark Zuckerberg wants it to be — is very understandable. In other ways, it’s baffling.

Google has likely hit a plateau with AdWords and AdSense, and the way to try to ramp up revenue growth is by charging advertisers more to target users based on their profiles, rather than by identifying relevant content or searches. On the other hand, Google’s been able to convince million of users to trust it, despite ever-growing fears that Google knows too much about us, by explicitly NOT building profiles. (I’ve already switched my default search engine in my browser to DuckDuckGo, and when I can find a good home for 19 GB of e-mail, Gmail will be the next to go.)

In the worst case scenario, Google may now actually believe that Facebook could use all the social data it captures and keeps hidden from Google to create a search engine that eclipses Google’s flagship technology. That would be disastrous for Google. Perhaps that’s why the returned CEO Larry Page is betting so heavily on Google+ and personalized search — and why he decided to tear down the data firewalls.

But my guess is that this isn’t true, and that a search engine optimized by Facebook-style social data wouldn’t topple Google. Instead, I think it’s all about ego — that Google is afraid of being eclipsed in public opinion by Facebook, rather than being truly concerned that Facebook could build a better search box. I think Google doesn’t want to be perceived as losing, even if the company is making billions and billions annually without needing to really profile its users at all. Either way, Google has made it clear it is afraid, and you should be wary of companies running scared. Scared companies make decisions that are often bad for their long-term prospects, and worse for their users.

And that’s exactly what your new mega-profile is — it’s creepy; it’s a double-cross, and it will, in the end, cement Google’s reputation as being too powerful and unworthy of our trust. A search engine doesn’t need to know my name, or who I e-mail, or need a secret psycho-graphic profile of me to get me to the right page. And if such an online profile would help and I want that help, it should be up to me to define that profile and connect the data services in ways that I define (oddly, exactly what Google’s initial profiles started out being).

So excuse me while I pervert a line from Ronald Reagan and proclaim, “Larry Page, rebuild those walls!”